Manage Well: Reasonable Price and Trusted Service

October 1, 2013

If I can do this for a reasonable price, will you do the business with me?

The executive and manager establish thought pattern and policy among service and sales and customer. Go for reasonable price business. The bid mentality prevalent in many industries is predicated on being short changed in a transaction. Reasonable price is predicated on trust, loyalty, and commitment to the good of the customer. Over time, a reasonable price relationship delivers the best product for a customer at the best price. Excess people time, unwanted and mismatched goods and services and mistakes decrease. Major cost savings are engaged.

Meet A Need: Ask this question when working with “bid” mentality buyers before you haggle on pennies. The question digs to the real trust involved in the transaction. The question reveals your heart to do the best work for the client at a reasonable cost according to their needs.

Ask this question when working with a trusted client, who has come to you with a bid.

Rule of Respect: Ask this question as a rule of respect and many clients will engage business with you based on trust and your commitment to reasonable pricing and exceptional service. Both of you will save money as trust is a faster transaction, requires less people involved on both ends, and over time ends up in a continuing lowering of cost based on watching out for the good of your client.

Are You Being Real? Are you coming to me with this business in order to justify an action with someone else on which you have already decided? Are you bringing this to me as an honest opportunity with a fair chance for me to do the business? Do I have a chance to establish a trusted relationship with you for other business?

Are You Still With Me? For the existing client, this could lead to other questions. Maybe they have lost some trust due to a miscommunication. Maybe someone has opened a question in their mind about you and your team that needs answered. Maybe they are just feeling a little neglected or want to express some freedom. It is worth asking.

Engage The Heart of Service: Many internal organization providers look to get “right of first refusal” or “right to do business within a fixed percentage”. It amounts to the same question only if your heart of service is fully engaged. If you are looking to force someone to do business with you through top down edict, they will mistrust you and find an alternate path. Frustration and lack of liberty in decision making breeds corruption and creative means of policy avoidance.

Reality Check: One client continually asked for pricing. This habit was costing us and them. The cost of estimating many times was more than the total price of the transaction. They were losing money bidding the items and we were losing money estimating minute work orders. Our customer service team engaged the “reasonable price” approach. Since the customer was familiar with our pricing through many transactions, they began to say yes. This alone cut four or five phone calls out of each transaction. Then they just moved to ordering with reasonable price expectation. This cut hours of their time and our time out of each order and moved orders into the production queue many days faster as approvals accompanied the initial request. People focused on quality and clarity and exactness in delivery instead of pennies. This customer is a customer for life in a trusted relationship based on reasonable price.